No-one wants to be told that their lifestyle is killing them and that they need to change their habits. So when the Heart Foundation (HF) set itself the goal to stop people dying prematurely of heart disease, a way had to be found of encouraging everyday people to take responsibility for the health of their heart, before they have a heart problem …and to approach things differently.

The Know Your Numbers (KYN) strategy, programme and campaign were developed to get New Zealanders to better manage their heart health. The campaign asked people to ‘just take a moment’ to complete a simple online heart health check. Once engaged in the high degree of emotional involvement was leveraged to encourage people to create a personalised, relevant heart health plan. This supported people to make lifestyle changes over a 6 week period.

The success of the programme and its launch was outstanding. Since launch in mid-March the microsite received 40,000 unique visitors as of 30 September against an expectation of around 3,000 per month, so the programme was 20,000 unique visitors ahead of target (200% of target). This visitation has resulted in 3,885 Heart Health Plan sign-ups, which is 1,935 ahead of our target of 1,950 (200% of target).